How Twitter works for me . . .
For me, the golden rule of Twitter is to be social. It’s all about having conversations, just like we do every day with real people.
I’ve been using Twitter for around a year and a half now, and I’ve got to admit I genuinely enjoy it! I’m communicating with some fascinating people, I’m finding out what interests them, and every day I find something from them that interests me.
There are a few simple things that make Twitter work for me. They’ll not be the same for everyone, as different people want different things from it, but first and foremost I make sure that the reason I follow people is because I’m interested in them, and not just because I want them to follow me back.
I’m not really concerned by the numbers too much, and I rarely actually look to see how many followers I have. I never have the urge to get to a milestone of followers, it’s the whole Twitter experience that’s more important to me.
I find that Twitter is a great leveller! By this I mean that it allows me to communicate with others in my profession, ask questions, give opinions and seek advice just as though they were in the same building as me. I run a (very) small business, and until now I think that a major disadvantage of this was that there were few people to bounce ideas off. If you work in an agency and you have a technical problem for example you can give the PHP Developer a buzz and ask for advice. We never had this – but now Twitter has changed it all. I can floor a question to the whole Twitter community, and often just one comment can put me in the right direction and save me hours of time. It’s faster than a search engine, and it’s a great way to build relationships for future collaborations and business opportunities.
Generally, I will follow an individual to see if they interest me. If it turns out that they don’t (or worse, if I find them annoying) then I’ll have no problem unfollowing them. Likewise, I don’t have any hang-ups at all about people who may decide to unfollow me. I certainly don’t get upset about it, if I don’t interest them and they don’t really want to hear what I have to say then I think that it’s the right thing to do. I don’t think that people should take Twitter too personally, ultimately you should just do what works for you.
I’ve gained so much from the people I follow on Twitter, whether it’s through an exchange of ideas, links to interesting articles or introductions to new people. It’s fair to say though that there are also things I’ve found irritating. I used to find the #NEFollowers tag really useful, but have recently found it to contain too many retweets of posts, most of which just end up going to people who’ve actually already seen them. There ended up being a few too many sales tweets in there too, along with the occasional “help me get to 200 followers” posts, so much so that I’ve eventually just stopped following it. At the moment it seems to be generating it’s own noise and the really interesting comments just get buried. Networking for business is a good thing, but I think sometimes we take our eye off the ball and before we know it we’re not actually being that productive, or helpful.
Ultimately though, it’s a personal thing. People use Twitter for different reasons and in different ways. What works for me won’t necessarily work for someone else – I think that it just takes a little time to find where it all fits in with your business and personal life. Get this wrong and you have an incredibly distracting application that sucks hours out of your week. Get it right though and it’s probably one of the most useful communication tools you could wish for.
